


Games of Strategy

by sahem62896



Category: Oz (TV)
Genre: M/M, Missing Scene
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-19
Updated: 2014-11-19
Packaged: 2018-02-26 05:28:35
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,405
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2639822
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sahem62896/pseuds/sahem62896
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>As 'Operation Toby' begins, Keller gets one hell of a glimpse behind the 'Crazy Beecher' curtain. (Kind of a sequel to "<a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/1359799">Pawn</a>")</p>
            </blockquote>





	Games of Strategy

**Author's Note:**

> This story takes place sometime after Beecher and Keller have their first shower the morning after Toby's nightmare... the one where they agree to look out for each other. Genevieve is still alive, and Keller has not yet told Schillinger in the gym that Beecher will be his. Whether or not the Hon. Grace Lima has come to apologize yet is up to the reader. You know how the rest goes: blah blah blah just for fun and blah blah blah own the rights to nothing.
> 
> Thank you for reading. :)
> 
> \------------------------------------------------------------------------------

_"And now I know why things aren't as pretty on the inside…" —Nine Inch Nails_

 

Beecher put his hand over Keller's and their eyes met.

"What?" Keller asked. 

"You're trying to capture that pawn, right?" Beecher confirmed.

"Yeah," Keller said. "Why?"

Beecher brushed the other man's hand away, shaking his head. He plucked the pawn off the board and replaced it with the bishop Keller had just moved. "You don't jump over pieces to capture them in chess," he said, handing the captured pawn to his opponent. "That's checkers you're thinking of."

Keller rolled his eyes and took the piece out of Beecher's hand. "I'm never going to figure out this fucking game," he grumbled as he set it down on top of the footlocker they were using as a table.

"Oh stop," huffed Beecher as he examined the board. "You're actually doing much better than you think."

"Yeah, I'm doing so well that I'm confusing it with something else," he said. He grabbed the toothbrush that lay next to him on the bunk and jabbed the handle of it under the plaster of his cast so that he could scratch his wrist. 

Beecher spread his hands out over the board. "You've got the right idea in terms of strategy here. You just need to remember how the pieces move."

"Whatever," muttered Keller as he removed the toothbrush and tossed it on to his pillow. This was the second game of chess they had played since they were locked in for the night, and it was also the second game of chess Keller had ever played in his whole life. Keller could tell that Beecher was enjoying teaching him how to play, but it seemed to him that Beecher was determined to not let either of them rest until Keller had completed at least one game without having to be corrected. _Once I get this cast off_ , he thought, _the same rule will apply when I teach you how to wrestle, Beecher!_

If the truth was to be told, Keller didn't mind all that much. He was discovering that the game appealed to his ability to scheme. What frustrated him, however, was that it gave him no distraction from the other strategy he was going over his mind, which was how he was going to get Beecher to trust him enough to be led to whatever trap Schillinger was laying for him. That was the main reason it was taking him so long to get the hang of chess when it shouldn't have. He had always been able to think at least two moves ahead when it came to running a Ponzi scheme on some poor schmuck, but doing so in chess was not as simple. He supposed it was probably because chess had all these stupid fucking rules that governed how the pieces could be moved whereas real life offered a little more of the flexibility to maneuver that Keller liked to have. Being quick to think on his feet had kept him safe and alive out there on more than one occasion. In chess, however, it seemed that you couldn't act extemporaneously; you had to plan carefully and align your forces in such a way that they guaranteed you protection while you tricked the other guy into falling into your clutches.

 _That's what Schillinger's doing with you,_ his mind whispered.

 _I know,_ Keller thought bitterly in response.

He had no idea when they brought him to Oswald that Schillinger was here with plans of his own that concerned Beecher and never would have imagined that the fucking piece of white trash who had saved his life in Lardner would be coming to collect. He thought that bastard was out of his life for good, but there he was coercing him into doing his dirty work... first with a razor blade to his groin and then later with a promise to keep his mouth shut about a series of killings in Chelsea that Keller was trying desperately to keep secret. There really was no other choice but to allow himself to be moved into place for the kill.

_Nazi fuck!_

It hadn't taken Keller long to learn why Schillinger wanted Beecher dead. Like all other prisons, the rumor mill at Oz was well-greased and running at top speed. As it turned out, Schillinger had been the one that Beecher had blinded in one eye and later shat on (Keller had figured that himself when he had seen the nasty scar that distorted the shape of the old Nazi's right eye), but that alone wasn't the reason behind this plot. According to the gossip, Beecher had pulled the ultimate retaliation for all his months of humiliation and torture by relentlessly antagonizing Schillinger to the point that Schillinger had tried to hire one of the hacks to kill Beecher. It turned out to be a set-up which cost Schillinger his chance at parole and added ten more years to his sentence. Upon hearing all this, Keller was impressed at Beecher's ability to con and realized that Beecher would have made one hell of a grifter — maybe even one hell of a teammate had he crossed paths with him sooner than this. He already respected Beecher for taking on the leader of the Aryan Brotherhood so brazenly, but now he was discovering that he kind of liked the crazy bastard with whom he was sharing a cell. When he later found out that Beecher had been a Harvard-educated lawyer on the outside, his mind was awash in could-have-beens that would have had him swimming in mountains of cash and had Beecher earning a generous cut of the winnings.

But now Beecher was his mark.

_Man, this sucks!_

To his credit, Keller was doing his best to go through with 'Operation Toby,' as Schillinger had called it. He had said to Beecher in the shower a couple of days earlier that he thought it would be to both of their advantages if they could trust each other. Beecher had been hesitant at first, but seemed ultimately agreeable. But as the days drew on, he started discovering that getting Beecher to do so was not going to be as easy as he thought. Whatever Beecher had been before Oz, the guy was now one tough nut to crack. And "nut" was still the operative word. Beecher may have been fucking brilliant in getting his revenge on Schillinger, but he was still crazy and therefore potentially dangerous. Even so, the memory of being held down to a chair in the library by two of Schillinger's thugs while the old man stood over him with a shank and a styrofoam cup had kept him on task... and so had the old man's continued silence.

 _Better make your move now, prag!_ Schillinger's voice thundered in his head as Beecher bent over the board. _Time's a-wastin'!_

"Hey, Beecher?" Keller asked after a few beats of silence.

"Hmm?"

"Did you really bite off another guy's dick?"

Beecher looked up at Keller through his eyebrows. "Stop trying to distract me," he said.

"I'm not," Keller said, painting on a disarming smile. "I just... well, I was just wondering."

Beecher sat up straight, but kept looking at him from under lowered eyebrows. "Why?" he demanded.

Keller shrugged. "Well, you know," he said, making an all-encompassing gesture with his hand, "there's what you hear around here and then there's the truth."

"And what makes you think _I'm_ gonna give you the truth?"

Keller turned his palms up at the ceiling. "I don't know," he sighed, realizing once more that he was getting nowhere fast. "Just forget I even brought it up."

Beecher went back to studying the board and figuring out his next move.  A few quiet seconds elapsed, and then Beecher said, "Not the whole thing. Just the tip."

Keller regarded him with interest. "Oh yeah?"

Beecher nodded and made his move. "Yup."

A slow, wry grin spread across Keller's face and he leaned in a bit. "Well, that gives a whole new meaning to the phrase 'getting some head', huh?" he quipped.

Beecher rolled his eyes and laughed a bit.

Attention returned to the game. It was Keller's turn to study the terrain after Beecher had moved his knight to a spot which guaranteed that one of his two pieces — either a bishop or his queen — was going to get captured. He knew enough not to sacrifice the queen, but he needed that bishop for his plan to win the game to work... or so he thought. He sighed, sat back, and pretended to analyze the board some more. "Why'd you do that?" he asked Beecher.

"Because I'm not going to let you win this game, knucklehead!" Beecher answered, his eyes brightening a bit.

Keller shook his head. "That's not what I meant," he said.

"What did you mean?"

"Why'd you bite off a piece of that guy's dick?"

Beecher quickly became sullen. "Why do you think?"

Keller tried for the comic angle. "'Cause you're not a vegetarian?" he asked, trying to coax a smile out of Beecher.

Beecher did not smile back, nor did his expression lighten. Under the hum of the fluorescent bulbs overhead, Keller swore he could hear the other man's teeth grinding together. "I'm so glad you think it's funny having a guy rape your face," he growled.

"Beecher, I wasn't trying to..."

"What?" Beecher's voice was rising to a yell. "What exactly weren't you trying to do?"

"Hey, easy!" Keller said, holding up his hands.

"Fuck easy!" Beecher snapped. "What is it you really want to know, Keller? Huh?"

Keller leaned in slowly, deciding to throw any attempt at being casual to the wind. "I want to know," he said levelly, "what turns a lawyer with a degree from Harvard into the nursery rhyme chanting maniac sitting across from me."

Beecher's lips pulled back in a grin that was chilling to behold. "Well now," he said, lacing his fingers and bending his hands back until the knuckles popped, "where shall we start? Should we begin with the day the leader of the Aryan Brotherhood branded a swastika into my ass or should we just get to the part where he raped me repeatedly while the wound was still healing? How about the time he force-fed me the pages of a law book in the library? Or the day he gave me a good-luck fuck before my wife came for a conjugal visit and then made me tear up pictures of her and my kids afterward all because I couldn't get it up?" He clapped his hands together and pointed his fingertips at Keller. "Maybe you'd like to hear about how he made me wear a dress and makeup while I sang him a torchy love song in front of the entire fucking prison? That one sound good to you?" The veins in his forehead were beginning to show as his face reddened and his voice rose. They formed a letter W that made Keller think of words like 'weirdo' and 'whacko.' Beecher's right hand twisted itself into an accusatory pointing finger. "Oh, I know what you wanna hear! You wanna hear about how that fucking asshole dressed me in a t-shirt with a Confederate flag on it and sent me out into the quad in hopes that every Homeboy in this fucking place would kill me! _That's_ the story you must wanna hear!"

Keller was trying very hard to stay seated and cool. "Beecher..."

"Oh, come on!" Beecher ranted. "It's got the best ending! Hell, let's just skip right to it! I wound up thrown into the hole naked as the day I was born and left there for ten days while I detoxed off heroin and came down from a bad PCP trip! Have you ever done that, buddy?" Beecher's voice had risen to a scream, and Keller was sitting upright and poised, wondering if he was going to get jumped right there in his pod. "If not, lemme tell ya... there's nothing quite like being cold and bare while you're fighting the shakes and the agonizing, suicidal depression! Then there's the puking your guts out repeatedly into a metal bucket _full of your own piss and shit and seeing fucking writing come out of the walls telling you that the LITTLE GIRL YOU KILLED WHILE DRIVING DRUNK IS WAITING FOR YOU IN HELL!_ "

With that, Beecher delivered a powerful kick to the footlocker they were using as a table. Keller flinched as chess pieces on the board toppled over and several clattered to the floor. Beecher reeled out of his chair and hurled himself against the glass wall of their pod. He pounded on it once with his fist, and then pressed his fingertips and his forehead against it. The skin under his fingernails went white. He was almost panting, and each breath came out more shuddery than the one before it.

Keller rose to his feet and walked over to him. He stopped just behind him and placed a hand on Beecher's right shoulder. "Hey, I'm..."

"Why are you always touching me?" Beecher cried.

Keller took a step back and held his hands up with the palms facing out. He heard a small click behind him and saw a rook rolling towards the wall on its side when he glanced over his shoulder. Trying to avoid crushing any of the other pieces on the floor under his boot, Keller tiptoed over to the wall, picked up the rook and dropped it into the cup of his left hand. He turned around and gathered up a couple of pawns and a king. "You know, I was coming down off of a sick amount of meth during my trial," he said. "I sat there the whole time on my hands, sweating and shaking. Everything seemed to be louder and moving at a snail's pace. Drove me out of my skull." He added another pawn and a bishop the the collection in his hand, and allowed one quick note of laughter to escape his lungs. "I kept thinking there were bugs crawling all over me and that I was going to have to rip off my own skin to make it to stop." His hand was now full of chess pieces and he paused to place them in a pile on the chessboard. As he brushed off a pawn that had stuck to the center of his palm, he looked up and saw that Beecher was facing him. There was a red blot on his forehead where he had been pressing it against the glass. His shoulders were slouched a bit and arms were hanging beside him as if each one was holding a heavy dumbbell in each. The look on his face was still savage, but the fire in his eyes had gone out and his breathing was no longer audible.

"You married?" Beecher asked quietly.

"Not anymore."

"Divorced?"

Keller held up a hand with the thumb tucked in. "Four times."

Beecher sighed. "I'm going through my first," he said, "and not very well either, as you can see."

He nodded. "Yeah, my first one was rough too."

"What happened?" Beecher asked after a pause.

Keller looked at the ceiling for a second and then back at Beecher. "Everything kinda fell apart after Kitty lost the baby. Couldn't stay away from the drugs or the cops for a while after that." His eyes connected with Beecher's and he shrugged. "She said that my self-pity was repulsive and that she was going back home where someone would actually be there to comfort her."

Beecher simply looked back. Keller's keen people-reader picked up sympathy in the other man's eyes, but he could also tell that Beecher agreed with Kitty at some level. It was okay. She had been right to divorce him.

"You got any kids?" Keller asked.

"Three. A son, a daughter, and a baby boy," Beecher replied in a voice that was just above a whisper. "I miss them terribly, and I can't even comfort them through this."

Keller smiled tightly and nodded. "I hear you." Another handful of chess pieces were placed back on the board. "Mine was a girl. We were going to name her April 'cause that's when she was supposed to be born." He shook his head and smiled wistfully. "That's how fucking creative Kitty and I got with baby names."

"I'm sorry," Beecher said.

Keller dismissed it with a wave of his hand. "It's in the past."

"No," Beecher said a little louder, "I mean I'm sorry about all this." He drew a circle in the air around the footlocker and the scrambled chessboard.

Keller smiled. "Hey, I'm the one who asked. You get what you pay for."

Beecher rolled his eyes again. "Well, you didn't need to know all that... or at that volume."

"You've got a lot on your plate," Keller observed. "And this is your first time in prison too, huh?"

Beecher nodded.

"Yeah, it'll drive you nuts.... and your family." He stood up and wiped his hands on the front of his pants. "Been there too. And you do what you have to keep going anyway."

"Yeah, like pretending I'm crazier than a shithouse rat so no one will really know how fucking scared I am."

Keller nodded. "Even that."

Beecher pushed away from the glass wall and got on his hands and knees to look under the bed for any remaining chess pieces. Keller's gaze fell to Beecher's ass and he began to wonder which side it was that Schillinger had branded. No sooner had the question occurred to him, he heard the Nazi fuck's voice in his head: _Nicely done, Keller! Way to get a good start getting him to trust you by telling your own detox story. Get him to relate to you... that's how it's done. But you know what? The part about your ex-wife and the lost baby... Jesus, you could have brought tears to a fucking stone with that bit. I guess as long as he never finds out that there never was a baby, that'll be okay. Hell, as long as he never finds out that April was the fucking dog's name, that'll be okay. You do remember the dog, dontcha? The one that Kitty ran over in the driveway when she got behind the wheel too tuned up on coke to realize she was driving at a leisurely ninety miles an hour? How the two of you were laughing about it all the way home until the dog ran out in the street to greet you on your arrival?_

Keller closed his eyes and tried to will the voice away as Beecher hooked a knight and another pawn out from under the lower bunk, but it would not be silenced.

_Your self-pity was fucking repulsive at the time and she did go back home, didn't she? Yeah, that was after you wouldn't stop fucking reminding her day in and day out about it. What was it you said to her? 'You killed the dog and now I'm stuck with a bitch like you?' Poetry. Pure fucking poetry. Especially from an asshole who was as drunk as you were that afternoon._

It was horrifying how the Schillinger in his mind knew things that the real one most likely didn't.

 _Well,_ said the one in his mind, _the good news is that you've got some stuff about Beecher to report to the real one so that he can build his fucking plan. The fragile emotional state, the newfound sobriety, the weakening family ties... Shit, Keller, you struck gold! You'll be leading Beecher by the nose in no time!_

Beecher had taken a seat on Keller's bunk and was now setting up the board again. He was arranging them so that white would be his opponent. Keller shook his head at the irony and sat down in the chair as Beecher put the last few pieces in place.

_And admit it... that's a fine looking ass too._

Keller sighed and mentally admitted that it was.

"Want this too?" Beecher asked, holding up his hand.

Keller looked. In it was the toothbrush he had been using to scratch beneath the cast. He accepted it, wishing he could sharpen the end against something and plunge it into Schillinger's neck.

But first he had to play this game.


End file.
